The phenomenon of infrequent price changes has troubled economists for decades. Intuitively one feels that for most price-setters there exists a range of inaction, i.e. a substantial measure of the states of the world, within which they do not wish to modify prevailing prices. However, basic...

Commonly used classification and regression tree methods like the CART algorithm are recursive partitioning methods that build the model in a forward stepwise search. Although this approach is known to be an efficient heuristic, the results of recursive tree methods are only locally optimal, as...

The growing demand for electronic devices has made the manufacturing of printed circuit boards (PCBs) a promising industry over the last decades. As the demand for printed circuit boards increases, the industry becomes more dependent on highly automated assembly processes using Surface Mounting...

Bereits seit mehreren Jahrzehnten findet die Optimierung in der akademischen Lehre und Forschung starke Beachtung. Trotz der Breite potenzieller Anwendungsfelder gibt es jedoch einige methodische Schwierigkeiten. Das Hauptproblem besteht darin, die Unsicherheit, d.h. stochastische Prozesse von...